Abstract

This paper reports a reading intervention programme, the LMVS
(Linguistically Mediated Visual Search) among pre-adolescent Chinese EFLs. It
sets out to test whether managing the process of silent reading might modify text
complexity as perceived. The paper is a combination of two studies. The first
study was the development and assessment of a reading comprehension test. The
second study piloted an intervention for pre-adolescents. Item-by-item analysis
of students’ performance in the post-test show changes in the perception of
item difficulty after the intervention. Chinese EFL struggling readers were found
to be weaker in lexical analysis. They also faced difficulties in decoding main
ideas in compound/complex sentences. In response to the analysis, strategies were
developed for automatic syntactic processing. The paper proposes seeing language
as a process, rather than a product so that learner management skills might be
prepared for reading intervention.